bleak house extreme slash the 89th codicil
by cd21.0
Summary: Extreme slash retelling of Bleak House
1. Chapter 1  Closing the Gap

THE 89TH CODICIL: A MODERN-DAY FAIRY TALE

PART I  
THE BEAST AWAKES

CHAPTER I  
CLOSING THE GAP

1

I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages.

Depravity, vice, even crime - my friends and I stand accused of all of these.

I do confess that I and my husband Dr. Allan Woodcourt, together with Adam Clare and John Jarndyce, are in fact guilty of the murder of Rachel Carstone, which the world and its lawyers would certainly call a crime.

Not that I am in any way ashamed of that act - this murder was one of the noblest, most deeply moral, most purely ethical deeds of my life.

But my friends and I have in fact in our youth been guilty of a number of heedless acts which left in their wake a long trail of moral and emotional carnage and whose details I am now sometimes ashamed to recall.

But there have also been some good things that have come of our youthful follies. There are two strong and happy marriages - or as Charles "Caddy" Jellyby prefers to call them, "blood brotherships" - between man and man, with wonderful adopted children and now almost with grandchildren. For this we can be thankful. And there was once a flawed - but while it lasted bittersweet happy - marriage between a man and a woman, with now a handsome widower and his biological child left behind. And for this we can also be thankful.

But enough of these preliminaries - I turn now to the facts of the case.

2

I was brought up, from my earliest remembrance - like a prince in a fairy tale, only I am not sure if I am charming - by my godmother. We lived in Norris Cove, near Bethel, Haywood County, North Carolina. We were in but not of Haywood County, as shown by the fact that we referred to the place we lived in as "the mountains", as if this were not the place where we should be living, but rather some exotic location to which we had pulled up stakes and moved, from a flatter territory where we really belonged.

In my childhood we had four or five slaves who worked our 50-acre farm for us. They lived, not in poorly built shacks as was customary at the time, but all together in a neat little white cottage on the other side of the dirt road that we called Norris Cove, across from our own, only slightly bigger two-story white house. Our slaves were emancipated when I was about 8 years old, but they continued as before to live in their cottage. My godmother never allowed me to have contact with these people, though, either when they were slaves or after they became freedmen, for fear that they would contaminate my language and my mannerisms. I can therefore say very little about the men and women whom we always, both before and after slavery, referred to as our "people."

Across the cove from our "people" lived my godmother, our white servant Miz Rachael, from a local "mountaineer" family, and me. My world at this time consisted of the walk of a few hundred feet down from our house to our barn at the end of Norris Cove; the tiny flat area where we raised tobacco, alfalfa and rye; Mr. Norris's and Miz Stiles's houses on the eastern side of Norris Cove, the same side as our "people"'s cottage; and, running down the entire western side of Norris Cove, rising abruptly from our flat alfalfa fields, a "mountain" - actually, I now realize, a small hill - which hid the vilage of Bethel on the other side and on which our cows grazed in a fenced-in pasture.

On Sundays my universe expanded to include the winding mountainous road through Sevier Gap from Bethel to Waynesville, where we had a house and where we attended church and prayer meetings every Sunday. How well I remember those Sunday visits, even now, 140 years after my childhood has ended! First, there was the excitement of our weekly Saturday night bath, with my godmother, Miz Rachael, and me bringing up the rear, sharing in succession a single bathtub warmed by a wood fire, followed by the acrid smell of lye soap on our bodies as we huddled in blankets together drying in front of the fire. Then there were the few hours sleep I was allowed to grab before being awakened in the dark and bundled still half-asleep together with my godmother and Miz Rachael into our horse and buggy, with our "people" following on horseback, for the trip to Waynesville. Then, half-awake, the brief glimpse on the other side of our "mountain" of the tiny hamlet of Bethel, where I took lessons from Professor Guyer at the Bethel Academy every week from Monday to Saturday. Then, the view of the mountains in the moonlight interrupting my fitful sleep as we took the 4-hour jolting journey over the hard mountain roads to Waynesville. Then, the prepararations for our devotions in our little house in town, followed by the great object of the day itself - a long succession of church, sermons, Sunday school, Bible recitations, prayer meetings, ladies' missionary society meetings, and prayers and Bible reading with our "people" in our house, ending in a final evening prayer service at church and then once more the long trip over the mountains back to Bethel.

My godmother was a good, good woman! She was handsome, and if she had ever smiled, would have been (I used to think) like an angel - but she never smiled. She was always grave, and strict. She was so very good herself, I thought, that the badness of other people made her frown all her life. I felt so different from her, even making every allowance for the difference between a boy and a grown woman; I felt so poor, so trifling, so far off, that I never could be unconstrained with her - no, could never even love her as I wished.

Although there were seven other boys in Professor Guyer's class at Bethel Academy, and although they called me little Eric Summerson, I knew none of them at home. I knew full well, from an early age, that there was a reason, related to what the world of the 19th century would have called a "disfigurement" in my appearance, why I would most likely never be able to associate with any of these boys in any way. Since I am writing these pages entirely from the perspective of the inner lives of the persons I am describing, I will not until a later, more convenient time mention exactly what my alleged physical "disfigurement" was. But, even aside from the physical difference between me and the other children, there seemed to be some other separation besides between me and the other boys.

During my first week at school, Professor Guyer, with the remark that "God damn it! He is a part of this school and if that is the case I will not treat him any differently from any of my other pupils!", invited me to his house for a little party, to my great joy. But my godmother wrote a stiff letter declining for me, and I never went. I never went out at all, except to school and to church on Sundays.

3

I had a vague idea that my being a boy had something to do with what I was sure was my godmother's low opinion of me. This feeling was confirmed in a strikingly traumatic manner at a very early period of my childhood.

It was during one of our weekly pre-church Saturday night baths.

Being originally from the 19th century, I was - of course indeed even now in the early years of the 21st century I still am - uncircumcised.

I noticed at an early age my godmother's marked aversion to the part of my body that she called my "manroot" and that Miz Rachael taught me to call my "teedle" or (totally feminizing me) my "bottom end."

I should therefore have known better than to respond when my godmother, pointing her shaking finger at my "manroot" that Saturday night when Miz Rachael pulled back my foreskin to gently scrape the week's collection of smegma from my exposed prepuce, hissed the following words through her tightly clenched teeth: "Look at it, Miz Rachael! Look at the stiff-necked arrogance of it! Lo behold, ye faithful, the whore of Belshazzar rearing her ugly red head aloft in the place of sin and iniquity!And one day this too will grow even larger, engorged in luxury and concupiscence - and filth - springing upwards from the forest of his loins, from whence all the evil deeds of mankind have their first origin and primeval cause!"

My response to this tirade, which I really did not understand at all, was to communicate what I felt was a most interesting fact about myself, a new-found hygienic practice that I wanted to share with the people that were my two best friends in life at that time. I therefore prattled innocently to my godmother from the washtub, pointing to my "teedle": "You know, godmother, to keep myself clean, whenever I tee-tee" (this was our childish word for urination) "I peel back the skin around the head of my teedle and clean myself."

Never will I forget the inarticulate keening and moaning, full of pained rage and horror, that emerged from my godmother's lips as she clapped her hands to her ears to shut out my childish babbling. After a few seconds she screamed at the top of her lungs at me in a horrible voice, one which I only heard one other time in my godmother's entire life: "No! No! And even here and now, in my escape from the world, you throw this up at me into my face!For this I have taken on mortality and given up the benefits of the 89th codicil! For this, the most foully monstrous of all of the monstrous instruments that God has ever created!"

The calm that followed was in its cold fury even more frightening than the storm that preceded it. My godmother now turned to me, commanded me to rise from the tub and, picking up a bundle of switches that lay next to the tub, announced to me: "Now, boy, I am going to mark you as you and that thing have marked me for life. Your marks will vanish soon enough - unlike mine, which you have branded into the depths of my heart and soul from the moment of your unlucky birth! Foul masculine creature that you are!"

A weekly punishment ritual, in which my godmother as chastisement for the real or imagined sins of the previous week, deliberately and with a long pause between each descent of the rod, rained switches down on my naked body while I counted out loud the number of the strokes, had been a normal part of my life since as long as I could remember. But that night's punishment was of an intensity and severity that I have never experienced before or since. I believe I must have counted out loud to at least 700 or 800 strokes, before my aunt ran out of switches. Even then she would have sent Miz Rachael out to cut more of them if it was not already time to get into our buggy for the long ride to town for church.

My godmother did mark my body that night, with great bleeding welts that covered every inch of the back of me from the nape of my neck down to the bottoms of my heels. But, even after these mere physical marks vanished after a year or so, this incident continued to haunt my life.

In those days it was a commonly believed old wives' tale that if a boy would kiss the tip of his elbow he would turn immediately into a girl. Each night, I remember it, I lay in bed, trying desperately to kiss my elbow, praying to God that He in His infinite grace and wisdom would see fit to turn me at once by a miracle into Elizabeth Summerson, Edith Summerson, Eleanor Summerson, anything but Eric Summerson. But God never listened to these prayers - Eric Summerson I remained and Eric Summerson I still am down to the day on which I am penning these pages of this manuscript.

4

It was my birthday.

I had never heard my mother spoken of. I had never heard of my father either, but I felt slightly more interested in my mother. I had never worn a black cloak, that I could recollect. I had never been shown my parents' grave. I had never been told where it was. Yet I had never been taught to pray for any relative but my godmother.

There were holidays at school on other birthdays - none on mine. There were rejoicings at home on other birthdays, as I knew from what I heard the boys at school relate to one another - there were none on mine. My birthday was the most melancholy day at home, in the whole year.

Dinner was over, and my godmother and I were sitting at the table before the fire. The clock ticked, the fire clicked; not another sound had been heard in the room, or in the house, for I don't know how long. I happened to look timidly up from my book, across the table, at my godmother, when I saw in her face, looking gloomily at me, "It would have been far better, little Eric, that you had had no birthday; that you had never been born!"

I broke out crying and sobbbing, and I said, "O dear godmother, tell me, pray do tell me, did Mama die on my birthday?"

"No," she returned. "Ask me no more, child."

"O, do pray tell me something of her. Do now, at last, dear godmother, if you please! What did I do to her and to my father? How did I lose them? Why am I so different from other children, and why is it my fault, dear godmother? No, no, no, don't go away! O, speak to me!"

I was in a kind of fright beyond my grief; and I had caught hold of her dress, and was kneeling to her. She had been saying all the while, "Let me go!" But now she stood still.

Her darkened frown had such power over me, that it stopped me in the midst of my vehemence. I put up my trembling little hand to clasp hers, to beg her pardon with what earnestness I might, but withdrew it as she looked at me, and laid it on my fluttering heart. She raised me, sat in her chair, and standing me before her, said, slowly, in a cold, low voice - I see her knitted brow, and pointed finger:

"Your mother, Eric, is your disgrace, and you are hers. The time will come - and soon enough- when you will understand this better, though you can never feel this as a woman could. I have forgiven her;" but her face did not relent; "the wrong she did to me, and I say no more of it, though it is greater than you will ever know - than any one will ever know, but I, the sufferer. For yourself, unfortunate boy, orphaned and degraded from the first of these evil anniversaries, pray daily that the sins of the fathers be not visited upon the heads of the children, according to what is written. Forget your mother, and leave all other people to forget her who will do her unhappy child that greatest kindness! Now, go!"

"And my father, godmother?" I ventured to ask.

"Your father, Eric," she replied, her tone rising a few notches in its vehemence and fury, "was the lowest of the low, and the vilest of the vile. You bear his marks all over your wretched face and body. More than this I cannot and will not say to you. Now, go, boy, do!"

She checked me, however, as I was about to depart from her - so frozen as I was! and added this:

"Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparation for a life begun with such a cloud on it. You are different from other children, Eric, because you were not born, like them, in common sinfulness and wrath. You are set apart!"

Whether I have in fact been as submissive, self-denying and diligent as my godmother would have wished, the reader will have to judge for herself from the remainder of my story.

5

One sunny afternoon, when I had come home from school with my books and portfolio, watching my long shadow at my side, my godmother looked out of the parlor door and called me back. Sitting with her, I found - which was very unusual indeed - a stranger.

When this strange man stood up, giving me a full view of his front, I nearly laughed out loud at the most bizarre and outlandish costume I had ever seen on a man until then. First, there was a great V-shaped swath cut out from the top of his coat with, as if to emphasize the unusual cut, the cut-out material turned back against itself for several inches in a grotesque mockery of a normal collar. The V-shaped cut-out area at the top of the coat ended in a single button, below which another giant V, inverted this time, had been cut out of the coat, as if to draw the viewer's eye unerringly to the crotch of the man's trousers, exposed to full view by the cut of the coat. Add to this the effect of a thin flat cravat, colored bright scarlet, with a small pointed head knotted at the top, and its body swinging loosely two feet down to slightly below the stranger's belt, where the end of the cravat was cut into an arrowhead pointing also straight down to the stranger's crotch, and the reader will understand the effect that this sensuous view of an adult man's body had on me.

When I add that the back of the strange man's coat was deliberately cut to follow the exact curve of his buttocks, and that there was even an exaggeratedly long split in the lower part of the back of his coat as if to mimic on a larger scale the crack between those buttocks, I really wonder that a person so deeply Christian as my godmother could tolerate for a minute such a sensuous presence in her house.

My erotic reveries were soon interrupted by my godmother's whispering to the stranger in an undertone, "This is the boy." Then she said, in her customary stern tone, "This is Eric, sir."

The gentleman sat down, with the scarlet red cravat now extending down between his legs to cover part of his testicles under his trousers, and said, "Come here, my boy!" He shook hands with me and asked me to take off my cap. When I complied, he said "Ah!" and afterwards "Yes!" And then, taking off his eye-glasses and putting them into a red case, and leaning back in his arm-chair, turning the case about in his two hands, he gave my godmother a nod. Upon that, my godmother said, "You may go upstairs, Eric!" I bowed slightly towards the arrowhead at the end of the stranger's cravat and left them.

As I left the room I heard him say to my godmother in a low tone: "I am really sorry, Miss Barbary, that we were so late in discovering your letter, which was unfortunately mislaid by one of our clerks among some papers in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, with the result being that the letter was not discovered until 100 years after you sent it. But what is 100 years between friends, my dear lady, at least when those two friends are parties to the great suit? Nothing, I am sure, as long as the 89th codicil exists to join those two friends together across the barriers of time."

6

It must have been about two years afterward, and I was almost fourteen when one dreadful night my godmother and I sat at the fireside. I was reading aloud from the Bible, and she was listening. I had come down at nine o'clock, as I always did, to read the Bible to her; and was reading from St. John, how Jesus stooped down, writing with his finger in the dust, when they brought the sinful woman to him.

"So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and said unto them: He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at her!"

I was stopped by my godmother's rising, putting her hand to her head, and crying out in an awful voice - the same I had heard long ago during the "teedle" incident - from quite another part of the Bible:

"Watch ye therefore! lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto all, Watch!"

In an instant, while she stood before me repeating these words, she fell down on the floor. I had no need to cry out; her cries had sounded through the house, and had been heard in our "people"'s cottage across Norris Cove.

She was laid upon her bed. For more than a week she lay there, little altered outwardly; with her old handsome resolute frown that I so well knew, carved upon her face. Many and many a time, in the day and in the night, with my hand upon the pillow by her that my whispers might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed for her, asked her for her blessing and forgiveness; entreated her to give me the least sign that she knew or heard me. No, no, no. Her face was immovable. To the very last, and ever afterwards, her frown remained unsoftened.

7

On the day after my godmother was buried, the gentleman in the weird exposed-crotch costume, whom I could not help thinking of in my mind as the "Crotch-Man", reappeared. I was sent for by Miz Rachael, and found him in the same place, as if he had never gone away.

"My name is Kenge," he said; "you may remember it, my boy; Kenge & Carboy, of New York City."

I replied, that I remembered to have seen him once before.

"Please be seated - here, near me. Don't get upset; it's of absolutely no use. Miz Rachael, I needn't inform you who were acquainted with the late Miss Barbary's affairs, that her means die with her; and that this young adolescent boy, now his aunt is dead -"

"My aunt, sir!"

"It really is of no use carrying on a deception when no object is to be gained by it," said Mr. Kenge, smoothly. "Aunt in fact, though not in law. Don't get upset now! Don't cry! Don't tremble! Miz Rachael, our friend has no doubt heard of the - a - Jarndyce and Jarndyce."

"Never," said Miz Rachael.

"Is it possible," pursued Mr. Kenge, taking off his eye-glasses as if without that medium his vision of me would be less distorted, "that our young friend - please don't lose control now! - never heard of Jarndyce and Jarndyce!"

I shook my head, staring down at the arrowhead covering his genitals at the end of his cravat, and wondering what he could possibly be talking about.

"Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce?" said Mr. Kenge, putting his glasses back on and looking over them at me, in the meantime softly turning the glasses case about, as if he were petting some beloved erotic object. "Not heard of one of the greatest federal diversity lawsuits ever known? Not of Jarndyce and Jarndyce - the - a - in itself a monument of federal practice? In which (I would say) every difficulty, every contingency, every masterful fiction, every form of procedure known in the United States federal courts, from state action to Our Federalism to ancillary jurisdiction to pendent party jurisdiction, from _Aldinger v. Howard_ to _Erie Railroad v. Tompkins_, is represented over and over again? It is a case that could not exist, outside of this our great and free country, the United States of America. I should say that the record in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Miz Rachael"; I am afraid he addressed himself to her, because I appeared inattentive; "which began in the year 1718 and is still unresolved over 250 years later consists at the present time of not less than 1,234,337 volumes containing a total of 2,435,768,436 pages," said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair.

I felt very ignorant, but what could I do? I was so entirely unacquainted with the subject, that I understood nothing about it even then.

"And the boy really never heard of the case!" said Mr. Kenge "Surprising!"

"Miss Barbary, sir," returned Miz Rachael, "who is now among the Seraphim -"

("I hope so I am sure, " said Mr. Kenge, politely.)

"- Wished Eric to know only what would be serviceable to him. And the boy knows, from any teaching he has had here in Haywood County, nothing more."

"Well!" said Mr. Kenge. "Upon the whole, very proper. Now to the point," addressing me. "Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in fact, that is; for I am bound to observe that in law you had none), being deceased, and it naturally not being to be expected that Miz Rachael -"

"O dear no!" said Miz Rachael, quickly.

"Quite so"; assented Mr. Kenge; "- that Miz Rachael should charge herself with your maintenance and support (I would beg my adolescent friend not to lose control of himself in such a manner), you are in a position to receive the renewal of an offer which I was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some time ago, and which, though rejected then, was understood to be renewable in the lamentable circumstances that have since occurred. Now if I aver that I represent, in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and otherwise, a highly humane, but at the same time singular man, do I compromise myself by any breach of professional privilege? " said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair again, and looking calmly at us both.

"Mr. Jarndyce," he pursued, "being aware of the - I would say, desolate - position of my young pubescent friend, offers to place him at a first-rate - I would use the word 'establishment' in this instance rather than 'school' - establishment, then, we will say - for similarly situated pubescent boys, where his education will be completed, where his comfort will be secured, where all his wants and desires will be satisfied - satisfied in the fullest and most satisfactory manner, I might add - where he shall be eminently qualified by this - establishment -to discharge that function in life that it has pleased - shall I say (to use a turn of phrase that would have been dear to your late aunt) Providence? - to call him."

My heart was filled so full, both by what he said, and by his affecting manner of saying it, that I was not able to speak, though I tried.

"Now, what does our young adolescent friend say?" proceeded Mr. Kenge. "Take your time, my boy, take your time! I pause for his reply. But take your time!"

What the desolate adolescent object of such an offer tried to say, I need not repeat. What that adolescent did say, I could more easily tell, if it were worth the telling. What he felt, and will feel to his dying hour, I could never adequately relate.

8

My departure was fixed for one week later, on which date I left Norris Cove early in the morning on the Asheville stage. I passed my first night ever away from Norris Cove at an inn in Asheville. At the end of the second day of my journey I spent the night at another inn in Black Mountain, on the edge of Swannanoa Gap, where "the mountains", in which I had passed my entire childhood, fall abruptly away by a steep descent of nearly 5,000 feet down into the flatter lands of the Piedmont.

The next morning, I woke early to get into a large, omnibus-like carriage where I was to be the only passenger for the trip across the "Gap" to Old Fort, the first village on the other side of "the mountains."

I should perhaps have had some hint of what awaited me on this ride when I saw the coachman, dressed entirely in black, with his face wrapped up in a quantity of wrapping so that I could not discern a single one of his features. But in my innocence I merely assumed that this was the customary costume for coachmen engaged in ferrying passengers across the "Gap" from Western to Eastern North Carolina.

My first real inkling that something might be wrong occurred, as we approached the summit of the "Gap" a few hundred feet beyond the village of Black Mountain, when I suddenly began to feel a slight tingling in my extremities, at first just in the tips of my fingers and toes but then soon extending all the way up to the tops of my arms and legs. I then felt a compression in my chest, which made my breath run short and my heart beat faster. My next sensation was of an extreme and painful cramping in my muscles, as if someone were pressing down hard with all his strength on my entire body, pinning me against my seat and in the process pushing and pulling at the same time on every sinew of my body. Almost immediately thereafter my arms and legs and chest and abdomen all began to jerk and twitch spasmodically and uncontrollably up and down. I felt next an indescribable lightness in my head and body, as vision faded and every molecule in my body seemed to expand a thousandfold.

For a few terrifying short seconds I was nothing and nobody, with no feeling or sensation of any kind, and with my entire corporeal existence melted away into the night of the cold, black, silent, indifferent universe.

I then felt the process of expansion reversing itself in just a few seconds as the molecules in my body seemed to contract again, bringing me once more back into reality.

I found myself, when I was recalled to life, not in the wooden coach in which I had left Black Mountain, but in a hard metal omnibus careening down the mountainside at a breakneck velocity which was beyond any speed that horses or even railroads could possibly achieve. Each moment I was tossed roughly from one side of the omnibus to the other. Each moment I looked into the abyss below and imagined that the next moment we would go tumbling to our deaths four or five thousand feet down the mountainside. Each moment I gagged and choked in the fumes of some horrible kerosene-like odor that seemed to be burning underneath our omnibus. Each moment I screamed, I cried, I begged our driver, who for some reason was now inside rather than outside our vehicle, to stop the carriage. Each moment he ignored my cries, only turning occasionally to laugh maniacally in my face.

But these were not the only horrors that penetrated my brain, as I began to realize a few things more about our situation in the omnibus. First, we were not being drawn by horses at all any more but by some other fiendish motive power that seemed to be burning, grinding, screaming from the metal floor underneath me. Then, I saw that we were not alone on the road - we were in fact surrounded by other great metal omnibuses, some four or five times as large as the one I was in, all heading towards us at great speed and all just barely missing knocking us off the mountainside.

I was never more sure in my life than at that moment that I had died and was being carried to Hell.

But it appeared this was not the case.

For at last the nightmarish ride did come to an end. I had in the course of my short, terrifying voyage across the "Gap" vomited all over myself, not to mention having lost all control of my bladder and bowels. It was thus a wet, snivelling, foul-smelling, vomit- and excrement-covered boy that the driver turned around to address at the end of the trip, when the omnibus finally came to a halt at the bottom of the "Gap", with the following speech:

"Welcome to the twentieth century, motherfucker!"

The driver then let the wrappings around his face fall down and I saw that there was no head or face at all visible above the driver's shirt collar.

Just before I lost consciousness in the back of the omnibus, an odd thought crossed my mind. I had noticed on a metal sign at the top of the "Gap" that we were passing from Buncombe County, in "the mountains", to McDowell County, in the Piedmont. For some reason this signpost jogged my memory and I remembered that I had once heard my godmother tell Miz Rachael in passing where we had come from in the plantation country of eastern North Carolina.

Eden. Eden County, in eastern North Carolina, that was where my aunt and I had come from originally.


	2. Chapter 2  The Reign of Terror Begins

CHAPTER II  
THE REIGN OF TERROR BEGINS

The terror is out in Eden County. For the black serfs who once tilled the fertile soil here have within living memory been emancipated from bondage and left to their own devices. Since the ex-bondsmen constitute not less than 85 of the population of Eden County, it is only logical that they would exercise their new-found democratic freedoms to elect a black Republican government for the county. This revolution has not, however, gone entirely unopposed by the former owners of serfs.

For now the white gentry of Eden County have taken to dressing up in white sheets as if every night were Halloween, haunting the houses of the freedmen and their white friends with death, rape, torture, destruction and pillage. There is regularly every Sunday in the Eden town square a lynching of blacks (the first and third Sundays of every month) or white Republicans (the second and fourth Sundays of every month). Every Sunday thousands of North and South Carolinians and Virginians, travelling by special excursion trains organized for the occasion by the railroads, flock to the town of Eden to see the week's lynching victim, after first having his genitals cut off and served to him in his mouth by the officiating preacher, ceremonially burned at the stake under the direction of that clergyman.

One of the Eden County belles has recently held a masked ball at her "place" near the town of Eden. The date of the ball is August 24. The _bal de St.-Barthélémy_, as it has come to be known, starts innocently enough as the hostess, costumed as Catherine de Médicis, begins receiving her guests at around seven o'clock in the evening. These guests are all masked and costumed in the elaborate Renaissance dress of _Henri III et sa cour_; even the _mignons_, with their tight, nearly transparent _braguettes_ on display for the world to see, have their representatives at the ball.

As harpists lightly strum and a masked chorus chants a series of Renaissance French madrigals, Catherine and her lover, dressed up for the ball as the Cardinal de Guise, together recite in the original French, and in beautiful, clear, high-pitched voices, a number of 16th century sonnets, by Pierre Ronsard, Louise Labé, Joachim du Bellay, Etienne Jodelle, André Scève and others.

Then the clock tolls twelve times in slow and sonorous succession. This is the signal for the guests, still masked and costumed, to begin their true work of the evening, which is a re-enactment of the _massacre de St.-Barthélémy_, with freedmen and Republicans rather than Protestants as the targets this time of the masked revellers' terror. Every historic detail is lovingly recreated. Such as the ladies of the court who poke through the heaps of bodies to jeer at the diminutive size of the white Republican members and to shriek in horror at the sight of what they imagine to be the large, blacksnake-like members hanging from the corpses of freedmen. Or the eighteen-month-old Republican baby who crows with delight as he plays with the _mignon_'s plumed codpiece, just before the _mignon_ interrupts the baby's laughter by skewering him to death on his bayonet.

The orgy of death and destruction ends near dawn at the Eden County courthouse, where the Republican government has huddled in fear all night long. The revellers force the government at gunpoint to abdicate in favor of a lily-white Democratic slate. The Cardinal would be satisfied at this point to let the Republicans go home unharmed. But Catherine insists on shooting personally in the neck every one of the 331 functionaries of the established Republican government of Eden County.

There is no Seine in Eden County into which the masked revellers can conveniently dump the bodies of the thousands of freedmen and Republicans whom they have slain in this recreation of the _nuit de St.-Barthélémy_. But the creek called Straight, which runs behind Lady Dedlock's "place" in Eden County, is so dammed up with human remains that a red-brown lake forms and laps up to within ten feet of the terrace at the back of the Dedlock mansion, called, from old time, the Ghost's Walk, until finally after a few months the wild hogs finish devouring the bodies, allowing the bloody waters of the creek called Straight to break free and go rushing madly downstream towards the nearby Neuse River.

As a final product of the _bal de St.-Barthélémy_, and in response to a specific request by Catherine de Médicis ("_N'est-ce-pas qu'il serait drôle, mon Cardinal, de voir toutes les deux semaines un pauvre prisonnier, nu, blanc et Républicain, subir le supplice de Ravaillac et de Damiens?_"), the _lynchage ordinaire_, to which the freedmen are subjected on Sundays in the Eden town square, alternates every other Sunday with a series of more refined and elegant tortures for the white Republican _patients_, who, after having their hands burned off in a sulfur fire, their body torn at the nipples, legs and arms with fiery hot pincers, with molten pitch poured into the resulting wounds, are, like Ravaillac and Damiens before them, torn apart by four pure white Arabian steeds, after which their still living torsos are tossed into the fire to be incinerated in the center of the Eden town square.

My Lady Dedlock has amid all this excitement been quite "bored to death." Therefore she has come away from Eden County, and has left it to the murderers, and the rapists, and the lynchers, and the Klansmen, and the torturers and the Catherines and the Cardinals.

And come instead to her house in New York, preparatory to her departure by private Concorde for Paris.

In the 20th century, of course.


End file.
